John Gray's confusion

I have sent the following letter to the New Statesman

Dear Sir,

John Gray, in his review of my book The Rational Optimist accuses me of being an apologist for social Darwinism. This vile accusation could not be farther from the truth. I have resolutely criticised both eugenics and social Darwinism in several of my books. I have consistently argued that both policies are morally wrong, politically authoritarian and practically foolish. In my new book I make a wholly different and more interesting argument, namely that if evolution occurs among ideas, then it is ideas, not people, that struggle, compete and die. That is to say, culture changes by the mutation and selective survival of tools and rules without people suffering, indeed while people themselves prosper. This is precisely the opposite of social Darwinism in the sense that it is an evolutionary process that enables the least fit people to thrive as much as the fittest.

Gray writes `There is nothing in society that resembles the natural selection of random genetic mutations; even if such a mechanism existed, there is nothing to say its workings would be benign. Bad ideas do not evolve into better ones.' I refer him to the wok of Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, Joe Henrich and others on exactly this point, especially their fascinating paper  `Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution'. As for the notion that this cultural evolution is not benign, I prefer to live in a world where global child mortality has fallen by two-thirds in my own lifetime, a world where hunger and slavery are slowly disappearing, racial and sexual equality are generally improving, the goods and services that the average person can afford are increasing and many rivers and the air of many cities are rapidly getting cleaner. These things come about through the selective survival of technologies and ways of organizing them. Government plays a role, yes, but so do other human institutions.

Gray writes that `In Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the small Pacific nations, some of the world's poorest societies are already suffering from climate change. Telling them they need more economic growth is not very helpful when they are being destroyed by drought or rising sea levels.' This remark, worthy of Marie-Antoinette, could not be more wrong. The suffering caused by climate change is (and is predicted by the IPCC for decades to continue to be) minuscule compared with the suffering already being caused by preventable problems: malaria, malnutrition, indoor air pollution, dirty water. Solving those problems through the eradication of poverty (ie, economic growth) would not only save far more lives, it would also enable people to tolerate climate change better without suffering. The World Health Organisation estimated in 2002 that 150,000 people were dying each year as a result of climate change. Even if you ignore the suspect assumptions behind this number (it includes an arbitrary proportion of diarrhoea and malaria deaths, and in a later estimate even inter-clan warfare in Somalia), these deaths represent less than 0.2% of all deaths and are dwarfed by deaths caused by iron deficiency, cholesterol, unsafe sex, tobacco, traffic accidents and other things, not to mention 'ordinary' diarrhoea and malaria.

Finally, Gray hilariously writes that `Laissez-faire was…imposed on society through the use of state power.' Should a slave be grateful to be released or angry at having been enslaved in the first place?

Sincerely

Matt Ridley